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This year, a handful of new recordings beat long odds and were among the 50 most popular holiday tracks: Lizzo’s cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Someday at Christmas” and Lauren Spencer-Smith’s version of “Last Christmas” by Wham! ranked Nos. 39 and 47, respectively, in consumption – measuring track sales and streams – from Nov. 4 to Dec. 22, according to Luminate. Kane Brown’s version of “Blue Christmas,” made famous by Elvis Presley, ranked No. 48.
If historical trends persist, though, many of this year’s new holiday recordings won’t even survive the summer. Creating a holiday standard is one of the most difficult, unlikely tasks in all of songwriting.
Looking back over the last five years shows the slim odds a new recording faces in becoming an annual favorite. In 2017, 72 newly released tracks made the top 1,000 holiday recordings of the last two months of the year. Three of them — Sia’s “Santa’s Coming for Us” (No. 37), Pentatonix’s “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” (No. 68) and Us the Duo’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (No. 98) — made the top 100. Gwen Stefani had eight of the 72 new recordings in the top 1,000. Hanson’s “Finally, It’s Christmas,” at No. 610, was an original song competing against new recordings of well-worn favorites like “Wonderful Christmastime” and “The Christmas Song.”
Five years later, only 30 recordings released in 2017 remained in the top 1,000. Sia’s “Santa’s Coming for Us” dropped from No. 37 to No. 171, while her song “Snowman” has risen to No. 53 to become the most popular recording of the class of 2017. Stefani had only three recordings from 2017 in the top 1,000, and her top-ranked holiday song, “You Make It Feel Like Christmas,” released in 2011, slipped to No. 42 from No. 18 five years earlier. Hanson was in the top 1,000 — with “What Christmas Means to Me,” originally recorded by Stevie Wonder in 1967, not its original song from five years earlier.
To become a holiday favorite, a new recording must prove itself by competing against popular holiday songs that have withstood decades-long wars of attrition. Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is a relatively young holiday standard at 28 years old. “Last Christmas” by Wham!, ranked No. 5 this holiday season, is 36. Ariana Grande’s “Santa Tell Me” (No. 7) and Kelly Clarkson’s “Underneath the Tree” (No. 8), just 8 and 12 years old, respectively, have beaten the odds to challenge established recordings like Andy Williams’ “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” (No. 6), released in 1963 and often heard in advertisements and movie soundtracks.
That weeding-out process isn’t enough to deter songwriters from trying to create the next holiday hit and collect royalty checks year after year, though. This year, Chris Isaak, Backstreet Boys and Thomas Rhett released albums or EPs of Christmas songs. Sam Smith, Alanis Morissette, Dan + Shay, Joss Stone, Lukas Graham and Remi Wolf released individual tracks.
Even though the odds of writing a holiday standard are slim, the payoff is a lure, says Rhett Miller, singer for the alt-country band The Old 97’s. Miller and his musician friends have told “a probably apocryphal story” amongst themselves about musician Nick Lowe walking to his mailbox one day in a bath robe and finding a check for a million dollars not knowing that Curtis Stigers’ cover of his song “Peace, Love and Understanding” was featured on the soundtrack to the movie The Bodyguard that would go on to sell 44 million copies worldwide.
“In the olden days, landing a song on a soundtrack like that was sort of the end all be all,” says Miller. “But, really, the Christmas song is the biggest dream of any songwriter — to have a song that connects and becomes a standard.” Miller acknowledges the long odds a holiday recording faces in becoming a recurring hit. Writing a holiday standard is like winning the lottery: A jackpot is exceedingly unlikely, but, as the saying goes, you can’t win if you don’t play. “I did have an idea that if we contributed an album of holiday songs to the conversation, we would at least be in the running for one of those songs that connected,” says Miller.
Miller has the benefit of having an influential company in his corner: Disney. James Gunn, writer and director of Marvel Comics’ Guardians of the Galaxy movie franchise, cast the Old 97’s for the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special that premiered on Disney+ video on-demand streaming service in November. The Old 97’s re-recorded their original song, “Here It Is Christmastime,” with actor-singer Kevin Bacon, and performed the song wearing prosthetic makeup. That helped “Here It Is Christmastime” debut at No. 7 on the Holiday Digital Song Sales and No. 27 on the all-genre Digital Song Sales charts for Dec. 10. Although the recording ranks only at No. 865 this holiday season, it will likely benefit from Marvel Comics fans viewing the special in the coming years.
In the streaming age, nothing helps posterity like a partnership with a giant multi-national entertainment platform. Lizzo, Spencer-Smith and Brown, the top of the Class of 2022, recorded their holiday tracks under exclusive partnership with Amazon Music. In earlier years, Amazon Music has released original holiday recordings by Katy Perry (“Cozy Little Christmas” in 2018), Carrie Underwood (an original song, “Favorite Time of the Year,” in 2020), John Legend (“Happy Christmas [War Is Over]” in 2019), Taylor Swift (“Christmas Tree Farm [Old Timey Version]” in 2019) and Camila Cabello (“I’ll Be Home for Christmas” in 2021).
“Each year, we really look to work with artists that we know our customers love and who we think are going to be a good fit for our holiday listeners and really work with them to find the right track,” says Stephen Brower, global co-lead, artist relations at Amazon Music, “whether that’s a cover in the case of Lizzo doing Stevie Wonder’s ‘Someday at Christmas’ or in Katy and Carrie’s cases, having brand new songs.”
What holiday listeners seem to want every November and December is comfort music that harkens back to eras bygone. Even an original holiday song must have a classic, throwback sound that takes from late ’50s and early ’60s pop and rock. The rockabilly in Bobby Helms’ “Jingle Bell Rock” and Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” production in The Ronettes “Sleigh Ride” set a template that’s been closely followed by later artists. “Ever since Mariah, only songs that had that ’60s Spector feel seem to be getting any traction,” says Sean Ross, author of the Ross on Radio newsletter.
Christmas is no time to reinvent the wheel. Recreating the sounds of Christmas past gives Lizzo, Spencer-Smith and Brown the best chance at capturing an audience and maintaining momentum for the next five years. “Because the Christmas music season is typically only about six weeks, people don’t get tired of them,” Tom Poleman, chief programming officer for iHeartMedia, says in an email to Billboard. “As a result, there’s a huge supply of great songs to play, making it hard for new ones to cut through. The ones that do break through are usually well-made remakes of holiday classics by a big star like Kelly Clarkson.”
This holiday season, Clarkson’s covers of Chuck Berry’s “Run Run Rudolph” (No. 103) and Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” (No. 238) were the first and second most popular versions of those songs after the originals. She also has popular versions of “My Favorite Things” (No. 282), “Please Come Home for Christmas” (No. 317) and “Silent Night” (No. 382). But Clarkson is the rare contemporary artist whose original songs are more popular than her covers. In a few years, “Under the Mistletoe” (No. 105) from 2020 and “Christmas Isn’t Canceled (You Are)” (No. 168) from 2021 could become the next “Underneath the Tree” (No. 8).
Miller is aware of the long odds that “Here It Is Christmastime” faces in the coming years – but he’s hopeful he can have a Clarkson-level hit one day. “It’s going to be something,” he says. “But will it be my Nick Lowe-in-a-bath robe moment? I don’t know. It would be great if something broke through.”
Music streaming company LiveOne’s podcasting division, PodcastOne, filed an S-1 with the Securities Exchange Commission on Tuesday as a prelude to becoming a standalone, publicly traded company. LiveOne has set a record date of Jan. 16 for PodcastOne’s special dividend to LiveOne shareholders of record.
The spinoff “will meaningfully enhance our industry market perception,” the company wrote in the filing, “thereby providing greater growth opportunities for us than our consolidated operation as a private subsidiary of LiveOne.”
LiveOne will remain PodcastOne’s majority shareholder and will distribute approximately 6.2% of outstanding shares to LiveOne shareholders. LiveOne will retain 86.3% of outstanding shares. The remaining shares will be held by holders of bridge notes as well as the company’s directors and executives. PodcastOne currently expects its shares to trade on the Nasdaq.
In addition, LiveOne said it intends to explore spinning out SlackerOne into a separate public company during its 2024 fiscal year. LiveOne acquired music streaming service Slacker in 2017 for $50 million. Slacker was ordered by a judge in November to pay SoundExchange $10 million for performance royalties owed since 2018. Slacker asked the judge to overturn the ruling, saying the decision had led debtors to default on two senior secured notes, threatening “economic damage” to the company that would be “unsustainable.” The judge denied LiveOne’s request.
PodcastOne was co-founded in 2012 by current president Kit Gray and Westwood One founder Norman Pattiz and ranks No. 14 on Podtrac’s list of top podcast publishers in the U.S. It has about 2.1 billion downloads annually and produces 350 episodes per week. Among its podcast titles are Court Junkie, Cold Case Files, The Adam Corolla Show and Nappy Boy Radio with rapper T-Pain. PodcastOne also operates LaunchpadOne, a do-it-yourself platform for independent podcasters in the vein of Spotify-owned Anchor and Amazon-owned Art19 that distributes content to Spotify, Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts and other outlets. LiveOne — then named LiveXLive — acquired PodcastOne in 2020.
PodcastOne generated $32.2 million in the fiscal year ended March 31, 2022, a 36% improvement from the prior-year period, and plans to have revenues of $25 million in the nine-month period ending Dec. 31, 2022, according to LiveOne.
While 2022 will be remembered as the year that Taylor Swift made history as the first artist to populate the entire top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 with songs from her album Midnights (among other chart records), Billboard’s annual Money Makers ranking of music’s top royalty and box-office earners reveals that she dominated 2021 as well.
Swift, who released two (Taylor’s Version) rerecorded albums, finished the year as the No. 1 earner globally with an estimated $65.8 million in take-home pay. That’s an impressive sum considering she did not tour, which usually constitutes the lion’s share of an act’s annual income, and last year’s runner-up, The Rolling Stones, spent three months on the road last fall concluding their No Filter Tour.
Swift topped the ranking because she owns half of her studio record catalog and because of the strength of her sales and streaming income, $29.8 million and $28.9 million, respectively, in a year that saw her international streams surpass her U.S. streams, 9 billion to 6.8 billion, a 34% increase.
The Stones’ live dates, all of which took place in the United States, resulted in a $44.5 million box-office take. That played the biggest role in boosting the veteran rockers to No. 1 on Billboard’s U.S. Money Makers ranking with a total income of $50.8 million.
But Swift, who finished second in the U.S. ranking — she and the Stones have swapped the top two spots since 2018 — was not far behind with $38.8 million, largely on the strength of her master recording royalties.
Compared side-by-side, the top five earners on the global and U.S. Money Makers rankings are nearly identical, with Harry Styles holding the No. 3 spot on both, $41.3 million and $37 million, respectively; and Drake at No. 5, with $30.7 million and $23.8 million. The big difference can be found at No. 4, where K-pop superstars BTS reside on the global ranking, with a $38.4 million in 2021 take-home pay, and the hard-touring Eagles occupy the U.S. tally, with earnings of $27.3 million.
Methodology
Money Makers was compiled with 2021 Luminate and Billboard Boxscore data, the RIAA’s physical and digital revenue report for 2021, and IFPI global revenue statistics. All revenue figures cited are Billboard estimates and may not equal the sum of the subcategories due to rounding and the omission of revenue categories. Global sales were extrapolated for 21 artists that ranked highest on the 2020 Money Makers list. Global artist royalties were extrapolated using U.S. revenue totals, minus 30% of international royalties in line with major-label contractual clauses for foreign distribution.
U.S. formulas were used to estimate publishing revenue. Calculating royalties from master-recording performance rights was not possible because those rights do not exist for most uses in the United States. Unless otherwise noted, references to streaming totals consist of combined on-demand audio, video and programmed streams. References to recording-career totals are the sum of an act’s sales, streaming and publishing earnings. Revenue from featured-artist appearances, merchandising, synchronization and sponsorship is not included. Touring revenue, after the manager’s cut, equals 34% of an act’s Boxscore. Sales royalties were calculated based on physical and digital albums and track sales. Streaming royalties consist of on-demand audio and video streams, and estimated royalties from webcasting, SiriusXM and Music Choice.
The following royalty rates were used: album and track sales, 22% of retail revenue; 66% of wholesale if the artist owns his or her masters. On-demand streaming royalties were calculated using blended audio and video rates of, respectively, $0.0053 and $0.0038 per stream, applied against a 37% superstar-artist royalty rate; 50% for heritage artists (acts that have released at a minimum of 10 albums or been active for at least 20 years); and 79% for artist-owned masters. Further, a blended statutory subscription per-stream rate of $0.0024 was applied to programmed streams and per-play estimated rates of 74 cents for Music Choice and $46 for SiriusXM. Royalties for programmed streams were calculated on a similar basis using a 50% base royalty rate; 68% for artists that own some of their masters and 100% for artists that own all their masters, minus 5% for side performers.
Publishing royalties were estimated using statutory mechanical rates for album and track sales. The Copyright Royalty Board streaming formula produced an average rate of 13.4% of streaming revenue, an average of $2.50 per play for hit songs; $1 per play for heritage spins and genre songs that didn’t attain hit status; and per-play publishing rates of 40 cents for Music Choice, $8.33 for SiriusXM and $0.0003 for programmed streams. A 10% manager’s fee and 4% producer’s fee were deducted from the appropriate revenue streams.
Over the course of the past year, the music industry has lost some of its brightest behind-the-scenes stars: corporate executives, songwriters, managers, producers, engineers, lawyers, promoters, inventors and more.
Between them, these individuals penned hit songs (“Crazy for You,” “Elvira,” “My Whole World Is Falling Down,” “The Way We Were”); helped launch important careers (Metallica, Prince, Little Richard); masterminded iconic cultural events (Woodstock); founded enduring labels (Stax, Impulse!); built empires (Clear Channel); created and/or produced iconic Broadway musicals (Hair, Dear Evan Hansen); helped popularize burgeoning musical genres (hip-hop, alternative rock); and even changed the way people listened to music.
While they may not have enjoyed the high profile or public adoration of their artist counterparts, these individuals played just as important a role in keeping the business humming – or at least dissecting it, in fire-breathing fashion. Some worked in the industry across decades and eras; others passed on far too soon, but left their mark nonetheless. Some created new and important spaces for underrepresented voices; others paved the way for those who came after them. They have been remembered as dreamers, visionaries and jokesters, and described as “magnetic,” “legendary” and possessing “a rock and roll heart” by those who knew and loved them.
To celebrate those who have passed on, Billboard is highlighting these often-unsung movers and shakers, all of whom made a difference in the music industry in ways both large and small, across every aspect of the business.
Here are the behind-the-scenes players we lost in 2022.
Hipgnosis Songs Capital is in talks to buy Justin Bieber‘s interests in his recorded music and publishing catalogs for more than $200 million, with the deal likely to close in the next few days, according to sources. The acquisition would include Bieber’s biggest hits, from “Baby” to “Love Yourself” and beyond.
In correspondence with Billboard in mid-November, Hipgnosis founder and chief executive, Merck Mercuriadis, said the company was working to “close about $500 million in deals between now and mid-December.” Although he did not say what the deals were at the time, the reported Bieber acquisition seems like a possible part of that disclosure. News of the upcoming deal between Bieber and Hipgnosis was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The incoming deal arrives at the end of a year that saw a cooldown in the music catalog market. Though major acts like Justin Timberlake (who sold to Hipgnosis for $100 million), Sting (who sold to UMPG for an estimated $360 million), Genesis (who sold a package deal to Concord for around $350 million), David Bowie (whose estate sold his publishing catalog to Warner Chappell for $250 million) and more have closed deals in the last twelve months for blockbuster prices, 2022 has been a markedly quieter year compared to the red-hot market of the last half-decade.
“The environment has changed entirely since the end of last year — interest rates are significantly up, currency exchange rates are very different — I don’t think the current market is what it was,” explained Joe Brenner, partner at entertainment law firm Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks, in an interview with Billboard this fall. In a mid-year report to investors, Mercuriadis also admitted this year’s environment has proven more “challenging.” To top it off, Brenner added, there are simply fewer high-dollar classic rock catalogs left to acquire, as many of them have already been sold (Pink Floyd being a notable exception).
Catalogs only a decade or so old, like Bieber’s, are often considered riskier investments than those that have had a longer runway to prove they will stand the test of time, and, as a consequence, they tend to fetch lower sums. However, these younger song collections are often where Hipgnosis chooses to invest its capital. Between the Timberlake catalog purchase this year and other acquisitions like Jack Antonoff, Mark Ronson, Timbaland and more, the company has bet big on buying modern classics to flesh out its over 65,000-song portfolio, which also includes songs by more seasoned icons like Journey, Leonard Cohen and Barry Manilow.
Hipgnosis Songs Capital is an investment vehicle established by Hipgnosis in partnership with Blackstone. The New York-based private equity firm pledged $1 billion to further investment in music IP and also took a majority stake. Hipgnosis Songs Capital is considered separate from the London-listed Hipgnosis Songs Fund, the acquirer of music publishing and recording rights. Additionally, the Mercuriadis-founded company includes Hipgnosis Songs Management, which manages the publicly traded company’s catalog.
Representatives for Hipgnosis and Bieber have not responded to Billboard’s requests for comment.
Elon Musk said Tuesday that he plans on remaining as Twitter’s CEO until he can find someone willing to replace him in the job.
Musk’s announcement came after millions of Twitter users asked him to step down in an unscientific poll the billionaire himself created and promised to abide by.
“I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!” Musk tweeted. “After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.”
Since taking over San Francisco-based Twitter in late October, Musk’s run as CEO has been marked by quickly issued rules and policies that have often been withdrawn or changed soon after being made public.
He has also alienated some investors in his electric vehicle company Tesla who are concerned that Twitter is taking too much of his attention.
Some of Musk’s actions have unnerved Twitter advertisers and turned off users. They include laying off half of Twitter’s workforce, letting go contract content moderators and disbanding a council of trust and safety advisors that the company formed in 2016 to address hate speech, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm and other problems on the platform.
Musk, who also helms the SpaceX rocket company, has previously acknowledged how difficult it will be to find someone to take over as Twitter CEO.
Bantering with Twitter followers last Sunday, he said that the person replacing him “must like pain a lot” to run a company that he said has been “in the fast lane to bankruptcy.”
“No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” Musk tweeted.
As things stand, Musk would still retain overwhelming influence over platform as its owner. He fired the company’s board of directors soon after taking control.
Is this finally the year that Christmas music streaming is cannibalizing holiday music sales? The raw numbers appear to suggest that’s the case, and some music industry execs have taken notice.
Since 2017, seasonal music album sales — physical formats and digital downloads — have dropped 61.8% to 1.44 million copies (so far) in 2022, as of Dec. 8. That’s down from 4.1 million copies in 2017, even though album sales are essentially at the same level of 90.55 million copies this year versus 91.64 million back then, according to Luminate data up to Dec. 8.
What’s more, seasonal music has held steady during that time, at 6.41 million album consumption units so far in 2022 versus 6.24 million album consumption units in the comparable 49-week year-to-date period of 2017, with an overall annual average coming to 6.3 million album consumption units during that five-year period. But within that, as you might expect, streaming has more than doubled, from 3.2 billion in overall holiday song streams, as of the 49th week of 2017, to 6.68 billion holiday song streams so far this year.
“This might be the year that streaming is impacting Christmas sales,” says one major label executive.
But while music wholesalers concede that the genre is not having the greatest holiday season in terms of sales, they counter there’s another reason this year’s numbers are sluggish. They argue 2022 is missing a key ingredient that in the past has proved to be a big catalyst for the overall genre during the holidays: a big, new Christmas album that drives traffic and fuels sales across the entire genre.
“While a lot of the new albums are doing fine and have done a decent volume, not one of them has been a breakaway hit,” says Alliance Entertainment senior vp of purchasing and marketing Laura Provenzano. In years past, big holiday music albums came from the likes of Josh Groban and his Noel album, which scanned 3.7 million album copies in its debut year of 2007 and now totals 6.32 million album consumption units in the U.S.; Michael Buble‘s Christmas, which scanned 2.45 million copies in its release year of 2011 and a total of 4.5 million album consumption units to date; or, going back further, Kenny G‘s Miracle, the Holiday Album, which scanned nearly 3 million copies in its 1994 debut. Those albums really stoked the genre’s sales numbers in the years they were released.
Besides lacking a big album this year, music merchandisers say the complexion of physical sales has changed, with more titles coming out in the expensive vinyl format while budget-priced CDs’ role in driving holiday sales has faced diminished floor space in discount department stores. So while merchants are realizing more revenue-per-copy thanks to vinyl’s popularity, they’re also seeing a drop in CD unit sales because of a squeeze on budget floor space.
“Some key retailers have pared back their presence in the budget business; there are fewer $5 bins on the sales floor nowadays,” offers Provenzano. Meanwhile, as more holiday albums come out on vinyl, “now that a lot of holiday music has a higher price point, it is no longer as much of an impulse item,” Provenzano adds.
For example, as of week 49 of 2017, physical holiday and seasonal album sales totaled 2.987 million copies, with 100,000 courtesy of the vinyl format. As of the 49th week of this year, total physical sales were 1.142 million, of which 637,000 were in the CD format and 503,000 vinyl, according to Luminate.
Music is generally considered impervious to economic downturns, but that doesn’t mean all genres are immune to the threat of recession, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything, music merchandisers say. While vinyl has been growing in leaps and bounds, when it comes to holiday music, shoppers are much more price sensitive these days, agrees All Media Supply music buyer Joe Pica.
Music retailers and wholesalers say that even if turns out to be a softer year for holiday music, many perennial Christmas titles are still selling consistently, if not as much as they once were; and that some of the new albums are doing pretty well too. The new releases they point to are Lindsey Stirling‘s Snow Waltz, which so far this year has generated 37,000 units — 25,000 physical copies — since its October release; and her 2017 collection Warmer In the Winter, which has generated 25,000 album consumption units so far this year and 455,000 units — 176,000 physical — since its release. Other new releases include the Bocelli’s A Family Christmas at 66,000 album consumption units — including nearly 52,000 physical copies — since its October release; and the Backstreet Boys‘ A Very Backstreet Christmas, which has so far accumulated 57,000 album consumption units, of which 38,000 are physical copies.
If only, music merchandisers lament, there was that one big album emerging from the pack. In fact, merchandisers were hoping the Backstreet Boys album would fill that role since it was initially going to be paired with a Dec. 14 special on ABC. But that show was pulled due to allegations that singer Nick Carter raped a 17-year-old girl during a 2001 tour — an accusation which he has denied. That news initially broke on Dec. 8.
A look at daily sales for that title for the last two weeks shows that the album is still selling at about the same pace, ranging from 1,100 to 1,400 copies daily through Dec. 12, with the exception of a 7,000 album consumption unit bump on Dec. 5. But even though its sales and streaming activity appears to be holding despite the allegations, the album is unlikely to enjoy a windfall in incremental sales that the holiday TV special would have delivered had it aired.
Besides new releases, other Christmas albums issued over the last few years — including Dolly Parton‘s A Holly Dolly Christmas — are also still generating healthy activity. Kelly Clarkson‘s When Christmas Comes Around has generated nearly 51,000 album consumption units, of which 15,000 copies are in physical formats, amounting to 106,000 units overall since its release in Oct. 2021; while Carrie Underwood‘s My Gift has garnered 46,000 album consumption units so far this year, of which 17,000 are physical, and 628,000 album units since its 2020 bow.
Meanwhile, Pentatonix has built up a strong holiday brand through six seasonal albums, which so far this year have garnered 251,000 album consumption units including 28,000 units from its latest effort, Holidays Around the World. However, only 10% — or 25,000 units — are physical copies. Trans-Siberian Orchestra is another holiday music brand still putting respectable numbers up on the board, as its four genre albums this year have collectively achieved 111,000 units in album consumption activity, of which nearly 28,000 are physical copies.
But even with that showing from current artists like Underwood, Clarkson and Pentatonix, plus legacy artists like Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Ingram Entertainment’s head of sales and marketing Steve Harkins wonders if we are seeing a changing of the guard in the holiday genre. For instance, the holiday seasonal album chart for the week ended Dec. 8 shows that albums from Christmas perennials from the last 50 years, like Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Andy Williams, Elvis Presley, Johnny Mathis and Burl Ives, collectively have only four albums in the top 25 of the Dec. 8 chart; and another six albums in the second half, from Nos. 26 to No. 50.
“We have always relied on the old staples, but now we are seeing more contemporary artists moving up into the top spots on the holiday charts; it could be a generational transition,” says Harkins. “Some of the crooners are being replaced. We are selling less units from them, although they do still sell steadily.”
Others disagree with that assessment, saying that while the old guard may not sell as well as they used to, they still do well, according to Provenzano. Or as All Media’s Pina puts it, “Are the kids today buying Bing? I find that hard to believe. But we still sell plenty of Alabama‘s Christmas album and other [perennial] holiday sellers keep plodding along.”
While the rise of newer holiday music may be true so far this year for the seasonal album chart, it’s not so for the overall holiday/seasonal song streaming chart. Of the top 25 in that chart, only three songs — Ariana Grande‘s “Santa Tell Me” at No. 6, Pentatonix‘s “Hallellujah” at No. 17 and Sia‘s “Snowman” at No. 20 — are from the last 10 years. That’s down from the prior year, when four songs within a 10-year release window made the Top 25 year-to-date holiday songs in the period ending Dec. 2, 2021. In fact, this year only 22 songs in that chart’s top 100 have been released in the last 10 years, and overall, only 34 of the top 100 holiday season songs were released in the current century. As for new holiday tunes released this year, only four songs made the top 100 holiday season songs as of Dec. 9, with Lizzo‘s “Someday At Christmas” showing the most activity at No. 55.
Some holiday classics remain strong sellers year in and year out, and some even grow stronger every year. Alliance’s Provenzano wonders how many copies of the Vince Guaraldi Trio‘s A Charlie Brown Christmas the industry can sell every year. Since 2017, that title has grown every year, from 76,000 album consumption units to nearly 191,000 units as of the 49th week of each subsequent year. This year represents its strongest frame yet, with the album up slightly from 189,000 last year, which was better than 2020 (164,000), 2019 (134,000) and 2018 (88,000).
But other traditional big holiday sellers, like the Mannheim Steamroller albums — consisting of nine studio and four compilation or live albums dating back to the late 1980s that have collectively amassed 23 platinum awards from the RIAA — have slowed down considerably. This year, that catalog has generated about 75,000 album consumption units so far, and of that only a little more than 3,000 were physical sales.
Still, the labels haven’t given up on their perennial sellers. They’ve begun boosting sales of various titles by refurbishing those albums, in some cases adding bonus tracks like the eight extras on Holly Dolly Christmas; or issuing the albums in different colored vinyl like with the Vince Guaraldi Trio classic. Up in Brighton, Mass., Newbury Comics buyer Larry Mansdorf says the latter LP is the chain’s No. 3 selling album — overall, not just seasonal — thanks to the chain carrying the album in green-swirl vinyl.
Still, unless holiday season album sales rebound, the major labels might begin to pare back their offering, says one label executive working in catalog. As it is currently, about 2,300 holiday Christmas titles are still in print, including about 400 that are also available in the vinyl format, wholesalers say.
“This may be the year we look at our Christmas title range and see what’s worth keeping in physical print,” the label executive says.
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Rodrigo Nieto-Galvis, the vice president and team lead in Miami for the Entertainment Banking division of City National Bank, is well aware that the Latin music industry works differently than any other genre, which is why he’s sharing his knowledge and expertise with independent and emerging artists who want to learn how to manage their money properly.
“It’s important to understand that usually an entertainer is self-employed,” he tells Billboard. “They don’t have constant earnings. They are easily exposed to lawsuits. They have international residency with income in multiple jurisdictions. And it’s really difficult to predict the future of their careers and their income.”
In this episode of Billboard‘sLatin Hitmaker podcast, Nieto-Galvis elaborates on five common mistakes artists make with their finances and how they can be fixed or avoided overall.
On building your career as a business: “You know, as an artist, sometimes they want to focus on their craft, on their art, on their music, but they also have to be the CEOs or of their careers. They need to manage their careers as a business […] and there’s something also that you may not be savvy in every area of a business, so you need to surround yourself with the right team. You need a lawyer, you need an accountant, you need a business manager who understands and can help you with your growth.”
On managing expenses: “You need to open an entity and you need to divide your personal income and expenses by your corporate income and expenses. Otherwise, your income is going to become your pocket money, and that’s not something that you want. You shouldn’t be mixing this type of income and expenses and also […] something very important as well is to not leave money on the table. So what that means is when you are negotiating contracts and deals, bring your lawyer, you know, bring somebody to understand these contracts and also sign contracts with every member of your team just to avoid future litigations.”
On creating a budget plan: “So the first thing that you need to do as an artist is creating a plan at a budget for the year. you need to know what will be resources you need to achieve the goals that you are trying to reach. Right. So like have a plan for 12 years. What are the resources that you’re going to need if you buy that car? If you can buy that boat, is that going to affect the plan? Are you still going to have the resources to achieve those goals? Right. So so again, the third issue is the area of problems is managing your expenses, having a budget, having a plan.”
On understanding taxes: “You really need to have an accountant that understands not only your business but the fact that you work in multiple jurisdictions, in multiple countries. So what we’re talking about is getting the right advice, or also there are elements such as the CW, tax exemptions, which are only for international artists.”
On protecting your savings: “Avoid getting into investments that you don’t understand and actually, the final component on that aspect is also to pay attention to estate planning. Like what’s the legacy that you’re going to leave, how you’re going to be providing to your loved ones once you are not here anymore. So you pay attention to those areas.”
Listen to the full episode of Latin Hitmaker here:
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At first, “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” made three people laugh.
One was Randy Brooks, nephew of the late comedian Foster Brooks, who wrote the song but couldn’t convince his own group to play it. The others were Elmo Shropshire, a veterinarian, and his wife, Patsy Trigg, a bluegrass duo that performed at casinos in the Southwest under the name Elmo & Patsy. Brooks met them outside a Lake Tahoe hotel in 1979 and wound up playing them the song. Elmo & Patsy performed it as part of their act, then booked studio time and recorded it as a single.
Then it took off — first on KSFO in San Francisco, which played it as a lark, then at more and more radio stations around the country. Trigg’s parents published “Grandma” through their Tennessee gospel-music company, Kris Publishing, which meant Brooks made money every time it sold. But Shropshire, who owned the master-recording rights, turned out to be an aggressive DIY record man, recording a full-on album containing “Grandma” and lining up distribution through big drug-store chains. In 1983, it hit No. 1 on Billboard‘s Christmas Songs chart, then graduated to toys, films and TV shows. Today, it’s a holiday standard.
“It was an amazing rush,” says Trigg of the early “Grandma” days, before she and Shropshire divorced in 1985. “It was probably one of the most exciting times I’ve ever experienced.”
Billboard estimates the song’s publishing has generated $800,000, but the original Elmo & Patsy master-recording version has brought in $2.5 million through record sales and streaming over the years, all in the U.S. Much of that goes to Sony’s Epic Records, to which Shropshire signed a distribution deal in the early ’80s — meaning the veterinarian lost control of the master recordings and a lot of potential income. So Shropshire pulled a Taylor Swift-before-there-was-a-Taylor Swift and re-recorded the track under the name Dr. Elmo. His version generated an additional $7 million-plus. And that’s not even counting TV, film and toy licensing.
So the track has a happy ending — for everybody but Grandma.
“We did it all ourselves,” says Shropshire, 86, of Novato, Calif., in a phone interview between gigs performing the song at New Jersey soup kitchens and psychiatric hospitals. “We were working constantly. But it was fun. There’s something [that’s] great fun about being an entrepreneur.”
How did you come to be the performer on the song but not the songwriter?
Randy brought the song to me in Lake Tahoe. I thought it was provocative and funny. I thought the joke would be over after one or two times. At that point, I wasn’t professional enough to think about any recording business. I was still working at my veterinary hospital. I made a recording of it to give to some friends for a gag Christmas gift. One took it to a radio station in San Francisco and they started playing it. I had no idea. I was driving to work and [KSFO broadcaster] Gene Nelson said, “Well, we just played this song a little while ago, and a whole bunch of people called in and said they hated it. If we get 50 requests for it, we’ll play it again.”
How did it go from that to holiday hit?
In 1979, maybe 1980, when we first came out with the record, it was played a couple times. Right after Christmas, the bottom would drop out. At that time, there were probably 80 [record] companies. I’d send them a copy. I just had a little vinyl 45. They were interested in selling albums. I’d send a letter saying, “This is played on the radio, and I think it’s going to be good.” Almost every one would take the letter I wrote, and they had big Magic Marker on it, saying, “Stop sending me this shit!” In 1983, everybody started taping it from KSFO in San Francisco.
How did you capitalize on the radio exposure?
There were a lot of independent record distributors, but they’d [buy] 100 CDs — and at the end of a season, they’d send back, like, 98. Then we’d have to pay them back, or no money would exchange hands. My wife Pam Wendell — she was a salesperson — had the idea of making CDs and little displays and packaging them in a box and selling them to drugstore chains. We went to Longs Drugs in California. They had about 250 stores. It was different from getting them into record stores, when you usually didn’t get paid — then you’re competing with Elton John and the Eagles and your stuff goes down into the basement. Longs Drugs didn’t sell music, but at Christmas, they would put our displays out. Thirty days later, they would send us a check.
Then what happened?
We went from Longs to Eckerds, in the East. They had 3,000 stores. And we went to Costco and Sav-on — they had about 3,000 stores. Ultimately, we got into Dollar General, and they had 8,000 stores. I would try to do radio interviews. And they liked it. There was always a good angle: “Why did you sing a song where Grandma gets killed at Christmas?” I wasn’t that great of an interview, but it was fun for them and provocative. I would do interviews starting at 3 in the morning so I could be on the 6 a.m. morning shows in the East. I did probably 175 interviews every December. We lined them up every 15 minutes. That was from about 1994 until 2014.
At some point, Sony comes into the story, right? What was the story there?
In 1983, I spent a lot of money making a video. There was a man and wife in Nashville who had a little record company called Nationwide Sound Distributors. They got wind of it and said, “If you’ll sign a deal with us for a year, we’ll press 250,000.” Well, they sold all 250,000 copies, because people were hearing it for about three years, and there was no place to buy it. So the market was there. Billboard had it No. 1, in front of [Bing Crosby‘s] “White Christmas.” That’s when Epic [Records, part of CBS, later purchased by Sony] got involved and said they wanted to distribute it. It was a pretty onerous contract. I made an album of Christmas songs, so they could have an album. It probably cost $10,000 to $15,000. They gave me a $20,000 advance, but they owned everything. They sold a lot of records, and they just did nothing for promotion.
If Epic owned those recordings, you couldn’t sell the album yourself at drugstores, right? Is that why you recorded a different version?
That’s right. I re-recorded my own version of “Grandma.” We used all the same personnel. Even I can’t tell the difference.
You must be aware that’s exactly what Taylor Swift is doing. Have you followed that story?
No, I have not. No kidding! I’m so excited to hear about it.
Her record label was sold, including her original catalog. She didn’t like the people who bought the label and wanted to buy back the catalog but couldn’t. So she re-recorded all the songs and told everybody to buy and stream the new ones instead of the old ones.
I’ll tell you another thing about re-recording. Let’s say somebody wants to use the song in a movie. It’s a one-time payoff. They usually pay, I’m thinking, $25,000 for the publishing part of it to use the composition and another $25,000 for the master sound recording. So anytime somebody wants to put it on TV or a movie, [or] toys, more money comes from that than from record sales. If they use the Sony version, Sony just gives me a pittance. But if they use my version, I get the whole $25,000. This is the same with Taylor Swift.
Ah! I wasn’t even thinking about synchs.
Oh, you would not believe the times somebody would call up and say, “We want to pay X amount of dollars” — usually many thousands — “to use the composition in Jarhead.” And they’d say, “We’ve already contacted Sony and they say we can use their recording.” And I’d immediately call up the person and say, “Don’t use the Sony recording! Use ours!” That’s $25,000 out the window!
So you have to be proactive and make sure music supervisors know to use your version.
We have been on so high alert with that. Sometimes we’d have to talk ’em out of it. They’d say, “Who’s Dr. Elmo?” We’d get them to listen to it and they couldn’t tell the difference and we’d say, “We can give you a better deal.”
Did you ever recoup the $30,000 you spent on the video, and the $10,000 or $15,000 you spent in the studio for that Epic version?
Yeah, we made it up that year. That and more!
Well, I assume you have another 150 interviews to do today, so I should let you go.
No! We’re not afraid all those CDs will come back to us after the first of the year anymore. Those streams won’t come back to us. We’re not worried about that.
Most people probably didn’t even realize that Billy McFarland, founder of the failed Fyre Festival was out of prison until he popped up on TikTok Oct. 24, with a video showing an old pirate-style map taped to a whiteboard. He was hyping a new project that he claimed would be “a little crazier and a whole lot bigger than anything I’ve ever tried before.” Full details would follow in November, he said, as he pulled off the map to reveal a phone number, “but this time, everyone’s invited.”
It’s been over four years since McFarland’s planned Fyre Festival on Great Exuma in the Bahamas imploded, leaving concertgoers with soggy sandwiches and emergency tents instead of Blink-182 and luxury accommodations. A year later, he was perp-walked into Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center after being arrested for selling tickets he didn’t have to events like the Grammy Awards and the Met Gala, while out on bail awaiting sentencing for fraud charges after stealing $26 million from investors in Fyre Fest.
McFarland tells Billboard in an exclusive interview that his new idea will help him pay back the $26 million the judge in the Fyre Festival case ordered him to reimburse those investors. He says he came up with the idea during a tough stretch in solitary confinement, where he was sent after the prison warden realized that he had recorded a podcast while locked up.
“Ninety percent of the ideas that I had in there were for pure survival,” says McFarland. “If I wasn’t brainstorming this project, I would have gone crazy — it’s hell.”
His idea, which he first shared with his longtime girlfriend Anastasia Eremenko, a Russian-born model featured in the documentary Fyre Fraud, was to start smaller, by talking small groups of people into traveling to Great Exuma — then get bigger. So, he started posting videos and appeared on Good Morning America and the Full Send podcast talking up “PYRT” — pronounced “pirate” — which he described as a luxury Bahamas resort property, clothing line and digital metaverse that would kick off with a global treasure hunt. The prize, he said, was a private island in the Bahamas.
In October, before he posted the first TikTok video, he had even invited potential investors to sit in on a call with a regional Bahamian official, who assured McFarland he was welcome back on the island, according to Peter Vincer, the producer of the Dumpster Fyre podcast, which told McFarland’s story.
But, it won’t be that easy. On Nov. 14, Bahamas Acting Prime Minister Chester Cooper released a statement that the government would not approve any event affiliated with him. “He is considered to be a fugitive,” the statement read. “Anyone knowing of his whereabouts should report same to the RBPF” — the Royal Bahamas Police Force.
Until then, McFarland assumed the bigger problem would be getting permission from his probation officer to leave the Southern District of New York. “That was personally super tough,” McFarland says about his Bahamas ban. “The reality is that I owe a lot of workers money for their work on the festival, and they need to get paid back. And I just don’t have the money right now.”
That wasn’t his only problem. By the time he posted his first TikTok video, McFarland had fallen into a financial dispute with the lead investor in PYRT, who he met in Elkton Federal Correction Institute in Ohio, and the investor’s young business partner, Eric Bratcher, an alienated McFarland fan, now says his main goal in life is to “be known as the person who brought down Billy McFarland.”
Bratcher’s beef with McFarland is personal. He says he put his life on hold to help McFarland publish his memoir and launch PYRT, a project that Bratcher believes could have been successful had it not been for repeated misrepresentations by McFarland about its finances. (McFarland said he was always forthright about the PYRT’s money situation.)
Bratcher had invested with a businessman — identified by The Daily Beast as John Taylor — who put $640,000 into PYRT, mostly with wire transfers and checks made out to McFarland’s longtime friend and partner in PYRT, Michael Falb. Taylor, a private investor who served four years in prison for sex trafficking a 15-year-old prostitute, helped capitalize McFarland’s business without a contract or formal agreement.
Months after Taylor made that investment, McFarland kicked Taylor out of PYRT, which Taylor had been managing as one of three partners. Taylor says he was fired after he started to raise questions about how money was being spent, but McFarland tells Billboard that he fired Taylor because he had lied to him about the details of his conviction.
Bratcher was also let go because of his connection to Taylor. And since Bratcher had been hired to transcribe some of McFarland’s notes from prison to turn into a memoir that McFarland said he had a publishing deal for, he threatened to auction off the notes if McFarland didn’t pay him $75,000 to $150,000 for the work he had done. McFarland says he never told Bratcher he had a publishing deal in place.
A little more than a week before McFarland appeared on TikTok, he offered to buy out Taylor from the company in a deal that would have repaid his $640,000 investment, plus an additional $360,000 over the next six months. (Taylor says that he considered his investment in PYRT to be a loan collateralized against the $2 million book deal that McFarland allegedly told him he had made.)
Taylor didn’t believe that McFarland would be able to pay him back, so he countered that he wanted his money back in a week, plus an additional $5 million over the next two years, according to emails provided to Billboard. McFarland’s attorneys rejected this offer on Oct. 31, despite threats from Taylor and Bratcher to tell the FBI and the U.S. Probation and Parole Office that McFarland had misappropriated Taylor’s investment. After McFarland’s attorneys rejected Taylor and Bratcher’s offer, Bratcher tells Billboard that he and Taylor did go to the FBI.
Amid all of this, McFarland is still planning PYRT. “One of the things I should have done early on is cut out all of the jail people from my life,” McFarland says. He’s still pushing forward, despite this fight, his ban from the Bahamas, or the issues involved in raising investment after a fraud conviction. After all, he owes his $26 million under the terms of his sentence, and how else could he possibly raise it?
McFarland was able to garner more than $26 million for Fyre Festival because he offered potential partners more than just a return on investment. Most ventures show plenty of potential on paper. McFarland’s also offered something that potential investors couldn’t buy: status.
“People will give you money if you can give them access to something they don’t have,” McFarland wrote in a draft of his memoir, which Bratcher showed to Billboard. (He does not have a book deal.) So, to raise money for the Fyre Festival, he created a sizzle reel with video of Ja Rule and IMG models in swimwear on jet skis, and showed potential investors pictures of the island where Fyre would take place. When that wasn’t enough, according to an SEC complaint, McFarland resorted to forgery.
Among the documents McFarland created for investors was a false revenue report which showed that Fyre Media, the festival’s parent company, had generated $34 million (actual revenue: $1.5 million); a fake brokerage statement showing McFarland owned $2.56 million worth of Facebook shares (real holdings: $1,599 in shares) and a fabricated email from a private bank saying McFarland had been approved for a $3 million personal loan. McFarland created enough fake documents to be convicted of criminal fraud, defined under U.S. law as “intentional deception to benefit yourself or someone else.” He was ultimately sentenced to six years in prison and served four and a half years in five different facilities.
McFarland started serving his time in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, a squalid prison where billionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was found hanging from his lower bunk in 2019. After his sentencing, McFarland was moved to Otisville Federal Correctional Institute in New York, a minimum-security camp for white collar criminals that operates on the honor system and has also housed Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino and Donald Trump confidants Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen. There, McFarland was caught with a digital recording device, thrown in solitary confinement for three months and shipped off to Elkton Federal Correction Institute in Lisbon, Ohio.
In Elkton, McFarland met Taylor, now 49, who loved scuba diving and had battled cocaine and alcohol addictions for most of his life. Despite being two decades apart in age, Taylor and McFarland became close behind bars, where they would talk business and discuss their mutual interest in startups. After Taylor was granted early release in April 2020, the men promised to stay in touch.
Six months later, Taylor was ready to be part of McFarland’s first redemption project — the Dumpster Fyre podcast, produced by publicist and media executive Peter Vincer with Notorious LLC. The concept for the show was to document McFarland’s life in the general population of Elkton as prison officials dealt with a brutal COVID-19 outbreak that killed nine inmates. Prison officials had no idea McFarland was recording episodes of Dumpster Fyre from the prison phone until a trailer for the show aired. Hours after airing, McFarland was again hauled off to solitary confinement for a six-month bid, the hardest time he says he served behind bars.
“It’s fucking awful,” says McFarland, adding that he lost track of time, as hours, days and later weeks ran into one another. “As soon as you lose hope, you go crazy.”
It was in solitary confinement that McFarland first came up with the idea for PYRT, a fantastical island getaway in the Bahamas that would be part hotel and part digital universe, linked together through VID/R technology that would allow digital visitors and real-life resort guests to interact.
To generate awareness, PYRT would begin with a major stunt — the crash of a twin engine prop plane on the pristine beaches of Norman’s Cay (“…Aviation experts will be engaged to adhere to environmental and local regulations,” McFarland wrote in the draft of his memoir.) The crash would then kick off a global treasure hunt that would end where it began, in the Bahamas where the crashed plane would be converted into a diver’s reef, not far from a luxury hotel that would serve as PYRT headquarters.
McFarland continued to work on PYRT once he was released from solitary confinement in April 2021, then came up with an investor deck, which he sent to Taylor. When McFarland was released, Taylor was one of the first people to show up at the halfway house McFarland moved to, and he eventually gave McFarland and his business partner, Falb, a total of $640,000 — about $590,000 in wire transfers to Falb, about $40,000 through a debit card, and about $10,000 in cash. Bank records show that Taylor transferred $8,000 to $10,000 a month into a bank account and that McFarland was withdrawing money from the account at an ATM near his apartment.
McFarland says Taylor knew how he was spending the money and only shut down the account after the two had a falling out. It’s unclear why Taylor — who has a background in lending and originated and financed more than $100 million in international loans, according to his company’s website — would hand over so much money without any paperwork.
Whatever arrangements McFarland makes to pay back Taylor, he already owes $26 million to his former investors, and he says he has already found some ways to make money — recording videos for the app Cameo, signing a trading card deal and working on a TV project. But he still believes that PYRT represents his best bet for paying back his victims and moving forward with his life.
Eventually, that is. “I’d be stupid to say I could pay the money back in seven years or some set amount of time,” McFarland says. “Unless I win the business lottery, that’s just not realistic.”